United Kingdom

Martyn Goff, chairman of the Booker Prize committee, aroused debate in literary circles in 2002 when he suggested that by 2004 titles by writers from the United States should be eligible for the prize, which was open only to British, Irish, and Commonwealth writers. The chairman of judges, Lisa Jardine, countered that American authors such as Philip Roth would overwhelm the rest of the competition. “With someone like Roth at his best,” she said, “I can’t see how an [Martin] Amis or a [Ian] McEwan could touch him. The American novelists paint on a much bigger canvas. If you look at Pulitzer Prize winners, every book there is on a majestic scale.” Other Britons agreed, despite the ambitious breadth of much recent British fiction. In November, Booker Prize organizers announced that the prize would remain closed to American writers, however, they were contemplating the establishment of a second prize for lifetime achievement, and for that prize Americans might be able to compete. The Booker also had a modern makeover. The main award was increased from £20,000 to £50,000 (about $29,000 to $72,000), and a new five-year sponsorship partner was found in the Man Group, a global provider of alternative investment funds. (For selected international literary awards in 2002, see below.)

The year’s judges read 130 titles, from which the original list of 20 novels was chosen. Young stars such as Zadie Smith, with her novel The Autograph Man, were pitted against seasoned authors such as Anita Brookner, whose elegant The Next Big Thing was a compassionate story of a lonely 73-year-old man. The shortlist, comprising six novels, contained few surprises. Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry (seeBiographies), a dark Mumbai (Bombay)-based story about a 79-year-old widower, was a favourite with many critics, as was William Trevor’s The Story of Lucy Gault, which featured Protestants living in Ireland’s County Cork during the independence struggle in 1921. Carol Shields’s offering, Unless, was an admired depiction of the bonds between mothers and daughters. The Sunday Times promised that it would resound in readers’ minds “for years, perhaps for a lifetime.” (Both Shields and Mistry were Canadian contenders.) An Australian possibility was Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001), about a woman stranded in a remote fishing community with a husband she does not love and two stepchildren. The only British finalist was Sarah Waters. Her fast-paced Victorian-world Fingersmith was a popular success but was perhaps deemed too conventional in form to win.

The judges’ decision was rendered more transparent by the broadcasting of some of their debate on BBC Television. The unexpected winner, possibly a compromise choice, was Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Canadian-U.S. edition 2001), published in Edinburgh by Canongate, a small independent press. A lively and readable fable, with Noah’s Ark resonances, the novel charts the voyage of a young boy, Pi, who emigrates from India to Canada with animals from his family’s zoo. Lisa Jardine hailed it as an “audacious book in which inventiveness explores belief. It is, as the author says, ‘a novel which will make you believe in God—or ask yourself why you don’t.’” Martel, who lives in Montreal, said that his book “was the luckiest” and that accepting the prize was like “winning the lottery.” Canongate immediately began reprinting 50,000 copies, and its managing director, David Graham, said the win was a “quantum leap” for his press, although it had enjoyed another popular success with the bawdy The Crimson Petal and the White, an 864-page Dickensian-style epic by Michel Faber.

The Booker Prize, although the most famous of British literary awards, was not the most lucrative. The new Northern Rock Foundation Writer Award, worth £60,000 (about $87,000) was established by a Newcastle-based bank for writers living in England’s northeast. The first winner was Anne Stevenson, a poet from Durham. Her award, she said, was a challenge to those who “imagine that London is and will always be the only city of culture.” The much praised novel Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan (seeBiographies), which had been hotly tipped for the 2001 Booker Prize, was a popular winner of the 2002 WH Smith literary prize, worth £5,000 (about $7,200). Meanwhile, American writer Ann Patchett (seeBiographies) won the Orange Prize for Fiction, aimed at women writers and worth £30,000. Her topical novel Bel Canto (2001), about terrorists in Latin America who take hostage an American opera diva and a Japanese CEO, was praised for its attractive simplicity. On receiving the money, she said, “Hopefully I’ll give it away. If I can find it in my character.” The Whitbread Book of the Year, also worth £30,000 (about $43,000), went for the first time to a children’s author, Philip Pullman. The third volume in the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass (2000), was deemed “exceptional” by the judges and was enjoyed as much by adults as by children; the author insisted that the sharp divide between writing for children and writing for adults was over.

The robustness of the children’s market continued. Terry Pratchett, another best-selling author who crossed the child-adult divide, won the year’s Carnegie Medal. His The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (2001) was a dark but humorous take on the Pied Piper tale and was praised by the chair of the judges’ panel for its deft questioning of “our society’s attitudes and behaviour” and its ability to be at once “funny and irreverent.” On receiving the award, the prolific author castigated J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings for its insistence on war as a remedy to evil, saying he preferred to explore the possibility “that peace…can be maintained by careful diplomacy.” The international Hans Christian Andersen Children’s Author of the Year was Aidan Chambers, the first British writer to win the title since Eleanor Farjeon in 1956. The Carnegie Medal winner in 1999, Chambers was admired for his nonpatronizing handling of complex issues such as war, homosexuality, and death.

There was critical approval when W.G. Sebald, a German writer who had settled in East Anglia and had died in a car crash in December 2001, posthumously won both the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize in the U.S. and the U.K.’s Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. The awards confirmed him as a literary giant whose international reputation was rapidly increasing. Sebald’s works were compared to those of Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Vladimir Nabokov, and the judges of the British award hailed his novel Austerlitz (2001), a story told in a single 415-page paragraph, as a “novel of the first magnitude.” His 1988 prose poem, After Nature, was published in English in 2002 and was applauded as a haunting and sublime interweaving of memory, migration, and identity.

Notable fiction that was omitted from the prize lists included A.S. Byatt’s A Whistling Woman, her fourth tale in an engaging series about the lives of post-World War II women, and Linda Grant’s Still Here, a Liverpool-set portrayal of family, love, and loss that was autobiographical in tone. John Banville’s Shroud, a story about an aging academic, was also praised, for its exceptional fluency, but it made only the Booker long list, while Maggie Gee’s The White Family, a gritty drama of a contemporary North London family, reached the Orange shortlist. Tim Lott’s Rumours of a Hurricane, about a worker in a printing concern who goes on the picket line, was another deserving offering, with its deft portrait of politics and working-class culture in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

In nonfiction, themes of insecurity, war, and shifting identities threaded many titles as if echoing larger global trends. Philip Bobbitt’s 922-page The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History was a reflection of the growing anxiety that history might be “ending.” Charting 500 years of conflict, it claimed that the nation-state was dying, that a new constitutional order was emerging, and that politicians had to grasp the new reality if further warfare was to be prevented. Past wars remained under the historian’s lens. Michael Howard’s The First World War was a terse summation of that conflict and its aftermath, while Ian Ousby rendered a dense microcosm of one bloody battle in The Road to Verdun: France, Nationalism and the First World War. An original depiction of the Spanish Civil War was Paul Preston’s Doves of War: Four Women of Spain, which followed the fortunes of two English and two Spanish women caught up in the conflict of 1936–39. The Oxford historian Robert Gildea offered a thought-provoking study of France under the Nazis in Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940–1945. More provocative was Martin Amis’s reappraisal of Stalin. His Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million was criticized for what some deemed a simplistic equation of Hitler and Stalin, although others welcomed its reappraisal of a regime that killed millions. Richard Fletcher went back farther in time in his Bloodfeud: Murder and Revenge in Anglo-Saxon England, an ingenious early history that used anthropology to illuminate scanty historical sources.

History as it illuminates identity—particularly English identity—was a preoccupation of many writers, perhaps in response to the Queen’s celebration of her Golden Jubilee. William Shawcross rendered an upbeat 50-year account of her reign in Queen and Country, while Richard Weight’s Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940–2000 optimistically expected another 100 years of British Union, despite the increasing resentment of England in Wales and Scotland. Peter Ackroyd pondered English identity across a larger canvas. His 516-page Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination concluded that although the English vision “tended towards the local and the circumstantial,” it had made possible a vast creative achievement across many fields. Robert Colls’s Identity of England probed the more elusive nature of national definition. Examining imperial expansion and immigration and how these affected what it was to be English or British, he pointed to history as the “first act of recognition” in the process of building a sense of identity. Maurice Cowling, a retired Cambridge historian, delivered the third and final volume of his immense Religion and Public Doctrine in Modern England (2001). Subtitled Accommodations, it asked “whether the modern mind can escape religion” and analyzed, often with barbed invective, the basis on which British leaders and thinkers assumed their authority. Eric Hobsbawn’s memoir Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life also illuminated England’s intellectual life, while The Victorians by A.N. Wilson, a survey of 724 pages, examined the previous century and what its author termed “the period of the most radical transformation ever seen by the world.” Another history on the broad scale was T.C.W. Blanning’s The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe, 1660–1789, a broadly interpretative vision of the Age of Enlightenment.

Controversy followed when three politicians produced memoirs. Edwina Currie’s Diaries 1987–1992 covered her time in the House of Commons and shocked many with its revelation of her love affair with former prime minister John Major. The imprisoned former politician and blockbuster writer Jeffrey Archer broke prison regulations with the publication of his prison diaries, which berated the state of the penal system; the prison authorities decided not to punish him so long as he promised to publish no more memoirs until his release. A third Thatcherite, former defense minister John Nott, published Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Recollections of an Errant Politician, a memoir containing revelatory inside information, especially on the handling of the 1982 Falklands Islands War.

Well-received biographies included Rosemary Ashton’s Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage, which provided the domestic context behind the development of Carlyle’s thought, and Vanessa Collingridge’s Captain Cook, an adventurous study of the explorer’s life. The fourth and penultimate volume in John Grigg’s biography of Lloyd George covered his war years, but Grigg’s untimely death in the last days of 2001 begged the question of who would complete the study. Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self showed Tomalin as mistress of her craft with its sure sense of period and multifaceted portrait of her subject. Wilfred Owen: A New Biography by Dominic Hibberd was only the second study of arguably World War I’s most famous poet; it captured Owen’s shy charm and thoughtful morality. David Gilmour demonstrated similar shrewd perception in his The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling.

Comedian Spike Milligan, a beloved radio and television personality as well as poet, died at 83. A former member of the radio quartet the Goons, he also authored several volumes of hilarious war memoirs and nonsense poetry, rejoicing in such titles as Floored Masterpieces with Worse Verse, which he penned with Tracey Boyd. Lady Elizabeth Longford, the biographer of figures such as Queen Victoria and the duke of Wellington, also passed away.

United States

Most serious readers of American fiction would have to say that 2002 was an unusual year because the novel that dominated the best-seller list from late spring on was a first novel—California writer Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones—and the National Book Award (NBA) nominees in fiction, some of them first books, were all by writers unknown to a general audience. The winner was Julia Glass’s first novel, Three Junes, a family tale taking place on three continents.

Which was not to say that some known quantities had not published fiction of value and interest. Novelist William Kennedy weighed in early in the year with Roscoe, an addition to his Albany, N.Y., cycle that celebrates both the comedy and the pathos of urban American politics. Its eponymous hero cavorts through the thicket of time and competing interests that make up a city alive with pols and entrepreneurs, madames and lovers, mayors and thugs. After a 10-year hiatus, Thomas McGuane brought out a novel, The Cadence of Grass, with a smart if damned protagonist (“Good looking, quick-witted, a soul rented to darkness”), which won him some critical praise. Among other master veterans who published fiction were Gilbert Sorrentino with Little Casino, Ann Beattie with The Doctor’s House, Howard Norman with The Haunting of L., and Bharati Mukherjee with Desirable Daughters.

Kathryn Harrison, famous for her incest memoir The Kiss, published a novel, The Seal Wife, interesting both for its unusual presentation of her usual themes—passion and history—and for its exotic far north setting. In spare but telling prose, the story carves in ice a portrait of a young American present at the creation of modern meteorology. (Bigelow, the main character, “records ephemera: clouds, a fall of rain or of snow; hailstones, that after their furious clatter, melt silently into the ground. Like recounting a sigh. … He is recording a narrative that unfolds invisibly to most people, events that, even if noted, are soon forgotten.”)

A hard act to imagine—let alone follow—was the Bausch brothers, Richard and Robert, identical twins and both of them novelists, and both of them with well-received novels published in 2002. In Hello to the Cannibals, Richard Bausch produced an imaginative hybrid of a book, with a contemporary narrative about a young woman doing the research for a play about 19th-century British explorer and eccentric Mary Kingsley, whose story Bausch interweaves into the modern tale. Robert Bausch chose rural Virginia for his story of intrigue and retribution titled The Gypsy Man. Tennessee-born-and-raised novelist Madison Smartt Bell also went south in Anything Goes, his novel about a young rock musician on the American road. Robert Hellenga’s Blues Lessons (2001) took the reader into the world of contemporary music as he told the story of a young Michigan man and his love of the blues guitar and a girl from his childhood.

Less successful in execution was The Incantation of Frida K., Kate Braverman’s lyrical reconstruction of the life of 20th-century Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Oscar Hijuelos had a bit more success with the life of a Cuban composer in A Simple Habana Melody (from When the World Was Good). For his second novel, Walk Through Darkness, David Anthony Durham went to the history of slavery for an intense narrative about love and escape. In Big If, Mark Costello chose to make subtle comedy out of the material usually reserved for genre books. Spy novelist Robert Littell outdid himself with The Company, an 892-page novel recounting the birth and life of the Central Intelligence Agency. Craig Nova went to science fiction to produce Wetware, a story about two androids on the run and, in his competent hands, a study of the nature of what it is to be human. With Rapture, her book-length story of an act of coitus, Susan Minot stumbled badly. A fantasy writer with a literary bent (or a literary writer with a fantasy bent?), Jonathan Carroll produced White Apples. The late William Gaddis came to life again, with a posthumous short novel titled Agapē Agape.

One of the fine first books of 2002 was Berkeley novelist David Masiel’s 2182 kHz, the recounting of a rudderless Alaska tugboat crewman and his hope for a life beyond the ice and cold, a story told in lively, sensual language evoking a particular place: “The smell of the barge, with its mix of oil and grease and fuel, and its outdoor wind filled with diesel exhaust. … The patterned ground of the tundra … like a geometric field reaching to forever. The incongruity of a land that was at once desert and frozen marsh, the smell of the sea when it finally thawed, the sound of a lone seal.” Another great first book was Daniel Mason’s extremely well-reviewed novel about a late 19th-century London music technician traveling in eastern Burma—The Piano Tuner. Montana writer Debra Magpie Earling’s first novel, Perma Red, beautifully evoked the loneliness and solitude of a young woman’s life on a remote Indian reservation. Brad Watson’s first novel, The Heaven of Mercury, the thickly painted portrait of a small Southern town, was nominated for a National Book Award.

Among short-story collections, some masters of the form were at work during the year. Richard Ford came out with A Multitude of Sins (first published in London in 2001). Ron Carlson offered At the Jim Bridger; the late Alice Adams was represented by The Stories of Alice Adams; and the genre-busting Ursula K. Le Guin signed in with The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. Rick Bass published a new collection called The Hermit’s Story, and MacArthur Award winner Andrea Barrett delivered Servants of the Map.Tell Me, Mary Robinson’s collected stories, also came out. New writer Maile Meloy made her debut with Half in Love, and first-time book writer Adam Haslett’s collection You Are Not a Stranger Here was nominated for a National Book Award.

The value of some of the book-length essays and critical works for the year was readily apparent. Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky spoke strongly and well on one of his favourite themes—the role of poetry in an entertainment culture—in Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry. William Gaddis was represented once again by a posthumous volume, in this case the sharp-eyed (and sharp-tongued) essays on art and contemporary culture in The Rush for Second Place. Prize-winning novelist Jonathan Franzen approached the same subject in many of the essays and articles in How to Be Alone.

New Yorker Morris Dickstein took a traditional critical approach to post-World War II American fiction in Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970. Louis Menand, also a mainstay of New York criticism and winner of a Pulitzer for his work on American intellectual history, looked at writing and other aspects of contemporary culture in American Studies. Peter Gay went to bourgeois European culture, his traditional stamping grounds, in Savage Reprisals, an analysis of the novels of Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, and Thomas Mann.

Poet Edward Hirsch, the recently appointed head of the Guggenheim Foundation, looked mainly to poetry for his subject in the lively The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration. Arguing for a broad synthesis of modernist art and the work of American jazz geniuses such as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, the literary critic Alfred Appel, Jr., made Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce one of the most interesting critical works of the year. Russell Martin focused on the painting Guernica in his well-argued study Picasso’s War.

“Norma Olivia Walgren met Winfield Sprague Harrison in 1933 at the River Gardens, a dance hall just north of Big Rapids, Mich., on the banks of the Muskegon River.” Thus novelist and poet Jim Harrison’s memoir Off to the Side opens, rather conventionally, but Harrison manages before it is over to offer discourse on childhood, outdoor sports, food, writing, Hollywood, the American landscape, and philosophy in a spare and unpretentious voice. Writers Anne Bernays and Justin Kaplan, a couple for many decades, jointly composed Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York, in which family, the literary life, and indoor sports are recalled and scrutinized with great charm.

Some younger writers revealed themselves in memoirs such as Teacher by Mark Edmundson, an insightful glimpse into the intellectual (and nonintellectual) life of a Boston-area high school in the late 1960s; The Black Veil, in which novelist and storyteller Rick Moody assays his own moods and airs; and My Sky Blue Trades, in which one of the U.S.’s best young literary critics, Sven Birkerts, depicts his early life. Poet Gregory Orr wrote of a tumultuous event in childhood in The Blessing. Kim Stafford chronicled life with his father, the Oregon poet William Stafford, in Early Morning.

The third volume in Robert A. Caro’s massive biography of Lyndon Johnson appeared (and won an NBA)—The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate—while scholar Stanley P. Hirshson published General Patton and Edmund S. Morgan added Benjamin Franklin to the bookshelves. In Sinclair Lewis, Rebel from Main Street, Richard Lingeman turned the light on an American writer being reevaluated by critics and readers. May Sarton: Selected Letters, 1955–1995 was edited by Susan Sherman.

For poets, the year never lost its lustre, though it was dimmed somewhat by the death in late 2001 of Agha Shahid Ali (“A night of ghazals comes to an end. The singer/ departs through her chosen mirror, her one diamond/ cut on her countless necks. I, as ever, linger/ till chandeliers dim to the blue of Samarkand domes and I’ve again lost everyone”). The poet’s Rooms Are Never Finished made him seem quite alive still. Maxine Kumin in The Long Marriage (2001) went “Skinnydipping with William Wordsworth” (“I lie by the pond in utter nakedness/ thinking of you, Will, your epiphanies/ of woodcock, raven, rills, and craggy steeps”). Among other senior poets, 87-year-old Ruth Stone’s In the Next Galaxy won the poetry NBA, Grace Schulman presented Days of Wonder: New and Selected Poems, and Mona Van Duyn offered Selected Poems.

“Call it a field where the animals/ who were forgotten by the Ark/ come to graze under the evening clouds./ Or a cistern where the rain that fell/ Before history trickles over a concrete lip./ However you see it,/ this is no place to set up/ the three-legged easel of realism”: so U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins displayed his off-hand manner and Frost-driven plain style in Nine Horses. J.D. McClatchy put out Hazmat; Elizabeth Spires published Now the Green Blade Rises; and C.D. Wright signed in with Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (“In the space of an ear/ she told him the uncut version/ in all but inaudible detail/ without motors without phones/ he gathered round her/ like books like chairs/ her warmth her terrible warmth/ flooded the tone”).

Among the other many fine poets with books out in 2002 were Alan Shapiro (Song and Dance), Frank Bidart (Music like Dirt), Gerald Stern (American Sonnets), Donald Hall (The Painted Bed), Charles Wright (A Short History of the Shadow), Jorie Graham (Never), Stephen Sandy (with a long poem Surface Impressions), Joy Harjo (How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems), and John Koethe (North Point North: New and Selected Poems). In addition, Robert Sward signed in with Heavenly Sex (“Hello wife, hello world, hello God./ I love you. Hello certain monsters,/ ghosts, office buildings, I love you. Dog,/ dog-dogs, cat, cat-cats, I love you./ Hello Things-in-Themselves, Things Not Quite/ in Themselves [but trying], I love you.”) The debut volume by Santa Cruz poet Tilly Washburn Shaw, Swimming Closer to Shore, was met with serious pleasure. Among translations were Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and Mark Strand’s renditions from the Quechua and from Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Rafael Alberti in Looking for Poetry.

Ann Patchett (seeBiographies) won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Prize for her novel Bel Canto (2001), and the Pulitzer committee chose Richard Russo in fiction for his novel Empire Falls (2001), Carl Dennis in poetry for Practical Gods (2001), Suzan-Lori Parks in drama for Topdog/Underdog (2001), and Louis Menand in history for The Metaphysical Club (2001).

Canada.

In Canadian novels of 2002, the family—the importance of, the saving of, the destructiveness of, the hopes for—was a persistent theme. It was often explored from the viewpoint of a child, as in Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake, in which four orphans struggle to raise each other under the fierce, protective leadership of the oldest brother. In Lures, Sue Goyette studied temptation in the lives of two families, using their respective daughters as lenses. Donna Morrissey, in Downhill Chance, presented successive generations attempting to unravel the past in their search for a future. In Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry (seeBiographies), wove the unpromising strands of poverty, age, and estrangement with those of love, forbearance, and luck into a tapestry of life in modern Mumbai (Bombay). In Unless, Carol Shields investigated the meaning of goodness by portraying a mother’s efforts to understand her daughter’s decision to live on the streets. Nino Ricci approached similar themes from radical new angles in Testament. Cynthia Flood employed the metaphor of a calcified fetus in Making a Stone of the Heart to examine how love can die but remain unburied.

Escape from one’s family was a significant subtheme. In Christy Ann Conlin’s Heave, the bride flees the altar in order to come to terms with her life; in Marnie Woodrow’s Spelling Mississippi, two women inform each other’s search for love and independence. Also on the run, in this instance from the consequences of political activism, was the protagonist of Ann Ireland’s Exile. In contrast, the search for one’s family, one’s origins, was the core of Wayne Johnston’s The Navigator of New York and, in a different way, at the heart of Lori Lansens’s Rush Home Road, the story of a black woman’s de facto adoption of a mixed-race child. Nightlong reminiscences were the thread on which Austin Clarke, in The Polished Hoe, and Neil Bissoondath, in Doing the Heart Good, hung their tales of murder, mayhem, regret, and reconciliation, while David Bergen, in The Case of Lena S., strung up the myths of adolescent relationships with a fine noose of humour.

Short stories also covered familiar terrain. In The Broken Record Technique, Lee Henderson presented families who have lied so often to themselves and others that they no longer know what the truth is. Nancy Lee, in Dead Girls, dissected the lives of women in peril, whether in their homes or on the streets, and in Real Life: Short Stories, Sharon Butala deftly depicted how the uneven contours of dailiness can trip up even the wariest. Bill Gaston’s Mount Appetite studied the nature of the hungers, spiritual and physical, that drive us, often away from ourselves. Lisa Moore’s Open lifted the lid on young people looking for a way out, and Diane Schoemperlen’s Red Plaid Shirt: Stories New and Selected focused on the lives of lonely single small-town women. In Silent Cruise and Other Stories, Timothy Taylor explored the fates of people caught in the nets of their own elaborate plots.

Poetry went its usual idiosyncratic way, whether in Lorna Crozier’s Apocrypha of Light, in which women of the Bible were newly illuminated; Stephanie Bolster’s Pavilion, a metaphoric stroll through a garden of elemental images; Colin Browne’s lyrical fusion of war, conquest, and sacrifice in Ground Water; or Erin Mouré’s explorations of the nuances of citizenship and feminism in O Cidadan.Games also figured, from Take Me Out to the Ballgame, Raymond Souster’s playful musings on that enduring summer pastime, to bill bissett’s peter among th towring boxes, text bites, in which the excesses of vernacular were subtly disciplined, to Kathleen McConnell’s satiric sporting with modernity in Nail Builders Plan for Strength and Growth, Douglas Barbour’s experiments with sound in Breath Takes (2001), and Linda Rogers’s examination of how people resist the pressures of modern life in The Bursting Test. Michael Crummey picked gems of insight from the wrack of loneliness, death, and broken pride in Salvage; Marilyn Bowering mixed emotions in transformative moments in The Alchemy of Happiness; and P.K. Page circumnavigated humanity in Planet Earth.

Other Literature in English

In 2002 literature in English from Africa, Australia, and New Zealand was distinguished by the number of international, regional, and national awards received as well as by new releases from major writers. Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, the first African Nobel laureate in literature (1986), became the first black and African recipient of Italy’s Vita di Poeta Prize. His new verse collection, Samarkand & Other Markets I Have Known, was published at year’s end, and his 2001 play King Baabu, a satire on the dictatorship of Nigeria’s Gen. Sani Abacha, appeared in print. Two nonfiction works that focused on the subject of African dictatorship were David Blair’s Degrees in Violence: Robert Mugabe and the Struggle for Power in Zimbabwe and Martin Meredith’s volume Our Votes, Our Guns: Robert Mugabe and the Tragedy of Zimbabwe. On a lighter note, Nigerian fiction writer Femi Ojo-Ade provided unpredictable twists of fate in his short-story collection Black Gods, while countryman Chimalum Nwankwo offered lyrical virtuosity with The Womb in the Heart & Other Poems.

In South Africa, J.M. Coetzee, twice winner of the Booker Prize, brought out Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, his much-anticipated second volume of serialized memoirs, in which he offers a self-portrait as a young artist whose eventual success is born out of misery. Talented 44-year-old novelist Ivan Vladislavic garnered South Africa’s 2002 Sunday Times Fiction Award with The Restless Supermarket (2001). Jack Mapanje was the recipient of the 2002 Fonlon-Nichols Award conferred by the African Literature Association (U.S.) for his contribution to African poetry and civil rights. Nobelist Nadine Gordimer won the Africa regional competition for the Commonwealth Writers Prize for best book with her novel The Pickup (2001), and Manu Herbstein won the Commonwealth best first book award with Ama: A Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (2000).

Best-selling Australian novelist Colleen McCullough completed her Roman series by re-creating Julius Caesar in The October Horse: A Novel About Caesar and Cleopatra. Veteran author Thomas Keneally brought out American Scoundrel, his biography of the infamous politician, American Civil War general, and murderer Daniel Sickles, while Australia’s finest living poet, Les Murray, saw the publication of two new works: Poems the Size of Photographs and Collected Poems 1961–2002. Tim Winton’s novel Dirt Music (2001) won the 2002 Miles Franklin Award. Winner of the 2002 Commonwealth Writers Prize was Richard Flanagan’s entertaining Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish (2001).

In neighbouring New Zealand, notable recipients of the Montana New Zealand Book Awards were Lynley Hood for A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Crèche Case (winner in three categories: reader’s choice, nonfiction, and history), Craig Marriner for his provocative Stonedogs (fiction), and Hone Tuwhare for his collection Piggy-Back Moon (poetry).

One of Australia’s most distinguished authors of children’s books, Elyne Mitchell, died on March 4. Mitchell, a writer for more than 60 years, was best known for her Silver Brumby series.